Originating in the work of Rousseau, with echoes in
Tocqueville, this concept made its major impact on the social scientific
study of religion with the publication of an essay titled "Civil
Religion in America," written by Robert Bellah in Daedalus in
1967. The article caused an almost unprecedented burst of excitement among
sociologists and other scholars of religion. Soon the topic became the
major focus at professional conferences in the social scientific study of
religion, and numerous articles and books—most being conceptual and
historical, some being empirically based—began to appear.

In social scientific usage, cultural
institutions are usually matched by certain kinds of social groups.
Religion, for example, is socially embodied in associations called
churches, education in schools, the economy in businesses, and so on.
Civil religion is unique in U.S. culture—and arguably in other cultures
as well—in that it does not claim an identifiable social group short of
the entire society itself.

Definition

The concept refers to a "transcendent
universal religion of the nation" and resonates well with the
functional sociology of Émile Durkheim and Bellah's mentor, Talcott
Parsons. Indeed, it was Parsons who was originally intended to write the Daedalus
article (Bellah 1989).

Bellah's article claimed that most
Americans share common religious characteristics expressed through civil
religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals that provide a religious dimension
to the entirety of American life. Later, he adds that civil religious
principles transcend the nation and represent a "higher
standard" by which the nation should be judged (Bellah 1970:168,
1974:255). Therefore, civil religiosity is posited to be a common, if not
socially integrative, set of beliefs in transcendent principles and
reality against which the historical experience and actions of the nation
should be evaluated.

Bellah's definition of American civil
religion is that it is "an institutionalized collection of sacred
beliefs about the American nation," which he sees symbolically
expressed in America's founding documents and presidential inaugural
addresses. It includes a belief in the existence of a transcendent being
called "God," an idea that the American nation is subject to
God's laws, and an assurance that God will guide and protect the United
States. Bellah sees these beliefs in the values of liberty, justice,
charity, and personal virtue and concretized in, for example, the words In
God We Trust on both national emblems and on the currency used in
daily economic transactions. Although American civil religion shares much
with the religion of Judeo-Christian denominations, Bellah claims that it
is distinct from denominational religion. Crucial to Bellah's Durkheimian
emphasis is the claim that civil religion is definitionally an
"objective social fact."

Although other American scholars had
articulated civil religion types of ideas (for example, Martin Marty's
"religion-in-general" [1959] and Sidney Mead's "religion of
the republic" [1963]), the publication of Bellah's essay at the
height of national soul-searching during the Vietnam War occasioned
Bellah's place as a major interpreter of American religion in the second
half of the twentieth century and caused an enormous and prolonged
outpouring of scholarly activity. The nature and extent of this work may
be examined best through the Russell Richey and Donald Jones anthology American
Civil Religion (Harper 1974), a bibliographic essay by Phillip Hammond
(1976), Gail Gehrig's monograph American Civil Religion: An Assessment
(Society for the Scientific Study of Religion 1981), and James Mathisen's
20-year review essay (1989).

Finding Civil
Religion

A subsequent "civil religion
debate" began that focused on several interrelated issues at the
heart of which, however, was a definitional question: In other words, what
really qualified as both civil and religion in the concept?
For example, W. Lloyd Warner (1961) had previously delineated a dynamic in
the United States that he called Americanism : How did civil
religion differ from this? Did people have to know they were civil
religious to be civil religious? Was civil religion in America more than
"an idolatrous worship of the American nation"? (see Mathisen
1989:130). Some general tendencies may be noted here.

First, there was a systematic critique of
the concept of civil religion qua religion , principally from the
historian John F. Wilson (e.g., 1979). This was partially offset, on the
other hand, by a shift in Bellah's own work, wherein civil religion became
an increasingly evaluative concept, as in his bicentennial volume The
Broken Covenant (Seabury 1975). No doubt, the U.S. bicentennial
provided a major impetus to civil religion discussion, so much so that
Mathisen refers to the period 1974-1977 as the "Golden Age" of
civil religion discussion.

Although the civil religion thesis claims
that civil religion exists symbolically in American culture, such
symbols must be perceived and believed by actual people if the symbols are
to be said to have meaning. Several studies by Ronald Wimberley (1976) and
others (Wimberley et al. 1976) developed statements on civil religious
beliefs and obtained responses on them from various public samples. The
findings show that people do affirm civil religious beliefs, although most
would not know what the term civil religion means. Examples of
civil religious beliefs are reflected in statements used in this research
such as these: "America is God's chosen nation today."
"Holidays like the Fourth of July are religious as well as
patriotic." "A president's authority . . . is
from God." "Social justice cannot only be based on laws; it must
also come from religion." "God can be known through the
experiences of the American people." These large surveys and factor
analytic studies helped to give empirical credence to Bellah's conceptual
argument that civil religion is a distinct cultural component within
American society that is not captured either by American politics or by
denominational religiosity.

Further research sought to determine the
locus and incidence of civil religion in the population: "Who is
civil religious?" (Christenson and Wimberley 1978). These studies
found that, indeed, a wide cross section of citizens do share such civil
religious beliefs. In general, however, college graduates and political or
religious liberals appear to be somewhat less civil religious. People
identifying with major Protestant denominations and Catholicism show
similar levels of civil religiosity. Groups having denominational roots
within the United States—Mormons, Adventists, and Pentecostalists—score
the highest on an index used to measure civil religiosity, while Jews,
Unitarians, and those with no religious preference tend to score the
lowest. Despite individual variation on the measures, the "great
majority" are found to share the types of civil religious beliefs
Bellah suggested.

Still further research evidence suggests
that civil religion plays a role in people's preferences for political
candidates and policy positions. For example, Wimberley (1980) found that
civil religious beliefs were more important than political party loyalties
in predicting support for Nixon over McGovern among a sample of Sunday
morning church attenders surveyed near the election date. The same was the
case for a general representation of residents from the same community. In
a statewide survey, Wimberley and Christenson (1982) found no social
indicators to be especially strong in showing people's public policy
preferences, but civil religiosity was second only to occupational status
in predicting one's policy outlooks. Another analysis of these data shows
that civil religious beliefs do not conflict with the principle of church
and state separation (Wimberley and Christenson 1980).

Regrettably, there has not been a
consistent, sustained attempt to measure the civil religious dimension in
American culture through time or to determine its effects on, say,
American politics through time. The reaction that greeted the original
publication of Bellah's essay can hardly be detached from concern over the
politics of Vietnam and its aftermath. The switching of attention in the
study of the religion-and-politics area from civil religion to the
"New Christian Right" that has been evident over the last two
decades may obscure the role of civil religion in the processes of
selective agenda successes and failures on the part of the Christian right
as well as the secular left (see Williams and Alexander 1994). Not to be
ignored either is John Murray Cuddihy's earlier, provocative work, No
Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (Seabury 1978), wherein
the case is made that civil religion constitutes a set of platitudes that
substitute for either serious religious or serious political action.

The Larger Scene

Various studies—some quantitative but
more of them qualitative—attempted to test the civil religion hypothesis
cross-nationally. These studies were largely uncoordinated; hence their
effects are difficult to assess. Some took the view that because civil
religion in the Durkheimian perspective is an "objective social
fact," then every nation should have some form of civil religion;
therefore any particular nation's civil religion should be able to be
detailed by an observant social scientist. Others took the point of view
that "civil religion in America" might be a unique phenomenon,
hence comparative studies should show how other societies are or are not
like the United States, and hence do or do not have a civil religious
component. Particular interest focused on the Canadian case—why it
seemed as though Canada lacked a civil religion, and whether or not, if it
lacked a civil religion, Canada were a "true" nation. Relatively
little attention in these cross-national studies as a whole, on the other
hand, was paid to the French intellectual tradition out of which the civil
religion concept emerged.

The civil religious inquiry has also
spawned a number of related concepts as more or less direct responses to
civil religion. These include civic religion, diffused religion, and
implicit religion, among others. In this context, the publication of the
English translation of Thomas Luckmann's book The Invisible Religion
(Macmillan 1967) in the same year as Bellah's essay is not an
insignificant coincidence. Both works received considerable attention, and
they provided fertile soil for the growth of an extensive conceptual
apparatus for studying religion in contemporary society and culture. The
two works also provide new frameworks for the classical sociological
debate over public versus private religion.

By the mid-1980s, the concept of civil
religion itself had become institutionalized within social scientific and
other scholarly work. Bellah himself consciously chose to drop the use of
the term in his magisterial collaborative assessment of American public
morality and American individualism Habits of the Heart (University
of California Press 1985; see Bellah 1989). But recent publications
indicate that the wind has not gone from civil religion's sails (see
Linder 1996, Marvin and Ingle 1996). There now seems to be a firm
consensus among social scientists that there is a component of Americanism
that is especially religious in nature, which may be termed civil
religion , but that, at the same time, this component is markedly less
in its significance than the "transcendent universal religion
of the nation" that late-eighteenth-century French intellectuals
envisioned.

Overall, the available social scientific
research finds that civil religious beliefs do exist in people's minds in
the United States, that these beliefs are widely shared and provide a
basis for pluralistic social integration across the society, and that
civil religious beliefs may be a relatively important factor in making a
difference in public preferences for presidential candidates and social
policies.